ARCH 672 - PROPOSITIONS
FALL 2024PROJECTS
Jonathan Bam Davis - Thermal Palimpsest
Brianna Kucharski - Cellular Dynamism
Welcome to Westerchester: Culture, Climate, and the Detail, Explored in 4 Acts
The role of architectural detailing today is often one of concealment. Have you ever noticed that we try to hide a lot of things within a wall? We don’t seem to like the messiness of all the active-systems technology that makes our buildings inhabitable. All of this hiding allows for a sleight of hand, to draw your attention away from what is really happening. However, given architects choose what to express and what to hide, detailing is highly political.
As a setting for this course, we will use the fictional (and climate fluid) American town of Westerchester as a backdrop to explore many issues linked to the embodiment of the American dream. In this context, the mis-direction detailing affords is often co-opted as a structural and political technique that underpins many of the challenges facing the US today: increasing inequality, systemic racism, climate change, housing unaffordability, among others. While architects are not in a position to offer policy solutions to these many issues, the act of detailing can be an effective political tool for a broader public engagement.
One of the biggest instigators of this noted architectural shift toward details of concealment is the widespread adoption of the rainscreen as the dominant construction method in the US and Northern Europe. The rainscreen requires that the aesthetics of an exterior cladding layer mask the internalized functional performance of the wall. It also has the effect of rendering its exterior homogenous, or disconnected. That is, climate can be instrumentalized as a representational ideal of performance, not necessarily responsive to context, let alone the current existential crisis. This shift to a representational materiality of architecture (and of climate), establishes a purposeful misreading, leaving an unresolved tension between these actors.
This course then, will use the detail as a site of investigation to intersect the expression of techno-performative issues of climate and building science with the formal agendas of popular culture vernaculars and futurisms.